The Marvel Cinematic Universe, already the most successful movie franchise of all time, has now just racked up another big achievement. It’s a well-deserved one, too, coming as a result of the success of the excellent Black Panther. The film was greeted with universal critical and audience praise on its release last month and has proceeded to exceed even the most optimistic box office forecasts, having hauled in an astonishing $1.1 billion already.
Though an MCU movie and therefore pretty much guaranteed to make money, nobody expected Black Panther to perform this well. After all, it’s being released way out of summer blockbuster season, it stars a relatively obscure C-list superhero and goes against the received wisdom that white audiences just won’t turn up to see a film starring a predominantly black cast.
Well, nuts to all the naysayers, as T’Challa is now sitting pretty in the top 20 highest grossing movies of all-time. Not only that, but its $1.1 billion gross has also knocked The Dark Knight Rises off its perch and made it the fifth biggest superhero film of all-time, thus giving Marvel all 5 of the top spots on that list. In case you haven’t been keeping up, the other 4 would be The Avengers, Age of Ultron, Captain America: Civil War and Iron Man.
Of course, the next film to beat will be the aforementioned Civil War, which has $1.15 billion to its name when compared to Panther‘s $1.10 billion. With the way things are going, though, Ryan Coogler’s spinoff should definitely climb over Joe and Anthony Russo’s threequel and, in all likelihood, will knock off Iron Man 3, too, which has $1.21 billion. Beyond that, we don’t see it rising much higher, but no matter where it ends, no one can deny what a tremendous theatrical run this has been.
Circling back to Marvel in general, though, and the future looks even rosier. Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers 4 (and Ant-Man and the Wasp) should nudge the franchise as a whole over the $16 billion mark and then there’s Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, Captain Marvel and whatever Disney decide they’re going to do with their purchase of the Fox IPs. Whatever happens, the future of cinema is still looking decidedly superhero-shaped, and we couldn’t be happier about it.
